recipe: green beans and sunchokes

i first had sunchokes at the river bistro: a salmon dish with sweet pea emulsion and roasted sunchokes. beautiful. so when i saw a package of sunchokes at wegmans, i put it in my cart, and thought i'd substitute the knobbly little tubers for potatoes. this is the first time i've cooked with them, and it all came out pretty nice, but i'll be trying more versions of the same dish to see what works best.

ingredients:

12 oz green beans
8 oz sunchokes
half a large red pepper
two medium yellow onions
four fat cloves of garlic
a tablespoonful of whole black peppercorns
a tablespoonful of panch phoron (cumin, coriander, nigella, fenugreek, radhuni, fennel)
a teaspoonful of turmeric

two inches of organic ginger

two chiles de arbol

a handful of coriander leaves

method:

i like to cut everything in smallish pieces so that it all cooks evenly and relatively quickly. this time, i added the beans and the aromatics first to the sizzling-in-oil paanch phoron and whole back peppercorns, put the lid on and let it all cook for about 10 minutes as i chopped up the sunchokes. i wasn't sure if the beans would soften first, or the sunchokes. they turned out perfect though, not too crunchy, not too melty. thank heavens. the trick, i suppose, is cooking at a medium-low heat throughout. but this works only for a dutch oven, i suppose. so anyway, i added the sunchokes after the beans had had time to cook for a while, then let the sunchokes cook for another 5 minutes or so, and then added the turmeric and chiles de arbol. after some vigorous tossing, i added some salt, put the lid back on and let it all cook for a couple of minutes, until they seemed done to me. i always add the coriander after i've turned the heat off, and i'll often let the dish sit for a while in the hot dutch oven. this time around though, i was right famished and took my portion right off the heat, snapped a hurried picture and devoured it with some rice. often my veggies wont be the right consistency for me, and i'd be frustrated, but these, as i said, turned out perfect, and hopefully i'll be able to redo them, so that the taste the same, sometime soon.